Those SHIELD owners who are lucky enough to be eligible for NVIDIA's GRID game streaming service, you've got two new options for cloud-based entertainment today. NVIDIA has added the zany open world sandbox game Saints Row: The Third and atmospheric zombie shooter Dead Island to the GRID beta, bringing the total number of streaming PC games to twelve.

For those of you who don't frequent the PC gaming scene, Saints Row is sort of the madman's alternative to Grand Theft Auto. By the third installment the series had morphed into a pastiche of M-rated gaming in general and the open-world crime genre in particular. In between the insane missions and R-rated humor, you'll find a solid over-the-shoulder game with gags that should please those who are fans of the GTAIII era. As a bonus, the GRID version of the game includes all of the various DLC. Dead Island is a more conventional game, wherein you shoot zombies. On an island. That's pretty much it, but the game's visuals (streamed perfectly to the SHIELD's 720p screen) are a treat for shooter fans.

GRID is free to SHIELD owners while in the beta stage. Previously you had to be physically close to NVIDIA's nortnern California data center to try out the service, but it looks like they've relaxed that restriction a bit - I can access games on a Verizon LTE connection in Texas just fine. You will need a connection with at least 10Mbps down, 40ms ping or less to NVIDIA's server, and a 5Ghz Wifi router to try it out. Once GRID exits beta it will become a paid service, but so far NVIDIA hasn't indicated what kind of pricing structure it's planning.

They haven't abandoned the Shield at all. As a matter of fact, they are soon releasing the KitKat Android OS update to it. They are releasing streaming and gamepad mapper updates regularly. They may not hype it extensively, but they do support it and have not abandoned it.

Tegra4 wasn't really hyped outside of the dev community. K1 and Tegra 6 will be more pushed than Tegra 4 was. Especially considering both the power (speed and efficiency) gains.

ProductFRED

Dead Island is one of the most boring games I've ever played. Sure, the island is huge, and you have some interesting things like weapons degradation. And I get it was trying to be more "realistic" compared to games like Left 4 Dead, but after playing you just ask yourself what the hell you're supposed to be doing. You wander this giant stupid island full of zombies, wacking them with shovels and whatever else you can find. And then what?

Franco Rossel

Do the missions and story.

ProductFRED

I tried. They're repetitive as hell. "Go get me this part for the car." / "Go get me a bottle of vodka." It's dumb. And this is coming from someone who enjoys strong single player storylines over multiplayer content. I grew up on the Half-Life series, among other games. Sure Dead Island looks great, but the fact is it's a boring, slow-paced game.

Franco Rossel

I have been playing it since Xbox Live gave it away free for Gold users (a week now), and it's not so bad. I mean, it's no HL2, but it's pretty passable, even if it's repetitive.